Here’s your new tool that makes it easy to communicate your specific competence needs to the right decision-makers
Before a new employee joins the workplace, it’s important to get the right people to spell out which competences they expect the employee to have. We’ve developed a tool that you can use to streamline this process.
When recruiting a new employee, is it important to gain insight into which competences the parties involved consider the most important? Most people would agree the answer is yes, and for good reason. It may be that the future employee’s manager wants competences that the team lacks. Or that the senior manager wants certain competences added to the organisation from a strategic perspective. Whatever is at stake, it’s a good idea to bring it to light. This ensures a common understanding and complete clarity about what is required from the specific recruitment task. The initial clarification of competences ultimately leads to greater accuracy in the recruitment process.
Although there are many good reasons for collecting this information, it can nonetheless sometimes be difficult to get this insight from often busy decision-makers.
We have therefore developed a simple and effective tool to help you streamline the process and save time in your organisation. We call it virtual competence prioritisation, and it’s as simple as a PDF file containing the 32 most in-demand competences described in everyday language.
Next to each competency, there is a clickable box where you can put a tick, as illustrated below.
We recommend sending the document to all people involved in the recruitment process, so that you can easily obtain their preferences when it’s convenient for them. They’ll simply need to select the 4-6 competences they consider most important.
This process is not only simple, consistent, and time-saving, it also ensures that all parties’ immediate preferences for the new employee’s competences are heard before the parties sit down together in a meeting room. Compiling wishes in advance can help avoid a situation where more dominant members of the group potentially overshadow the unspoken but extremely sensible wishes of others in the room.
Outline the final job profile
Once you have gathered the preferences, we recommend that you manage a physical or virtual meeting based on the wishes of the people involved. If more than one decision-maker is involved, they will likely have a number of differing priorities. It’s good to look these differences in the eye, so that you and other decision-makers can agree on the 4-6 most important competences that will make up the job profile. Your role here is to ensure that you end up with a realistic job profile that does not include conflicting competences.
Once the 4-6 competences have been defined, go to the test platform, People Test Match, and create a job profile. With a single click in the left column, you can select individual competences, which will then appear as green markings in the areas where the candidate’s PTP scores should be to match the desired job profile.
This is illustrated in the picture below.
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A double check mark means that the competence is obtained with certainty if scores fall within the spans of the job profile
A single check mark means you should be aware of something – either that:
- Some of the competences contradict each other
- Some of the competences include the same attribute but at different levels (e.g., Empathy lies between 70-100 in the competence Empathic but within 50-100 in the competence Appreciative)
What should you be aware of in this process?
Please note that this is a ‘select-in’ process, where you select the competences you want. An important part of creating a good job profile is being aware of what competences you do not want in a candidate. It is therefore a good idea to complement the virtual competence prioritisation with questions about which competences decision-makers would like to avoid (so-called “select-out”).
